YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexis Rivas

lines on the record: 48
first: 2023-04-25
most recent: 2023-04-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Quite like that before, but it was awesome. It was very generous of his energy and time. That was really quite an important moment for cover.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't name them. This is a very, very successful investor came to our factory for the first time and spent about three hours with us and basically really challenged our roadmap, kept asking why, like why. And if something didn't make sense to him or didn't seem completely solid, kept digging. And we came out of that three-hour conversation, realizing that we weren't like super far off, but we were far off enough that we readjusted the course of the company. out of that three-hour conversation. It was a very not heated, but it was like passionate. He really cared. It was like this intellectual vigor and we changed how he engineered, how he designed, how we planned based on that three-hour conversation. And I think for a lot of investors, those kinds of conversations are difficult to have. It was somewhat uncomfortable. Honestly, we hadn't experienced something.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rate, but we have to hit those first. Because if you try to scale with something that is not ready to scale, it won't work. And if it does work, it won't work nearly as well as if you actually scale something that is ready to scale. And we've developed those milestones, shared them internally and with our investors and are working towards that path. We've crafted the clear technical milestones that we need to hit to get to where we want to go. We've communicated that and everyone now looks at how well we're doing based on that versus a generic set of startup metrics that may not apply.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest thing is the developer really, really clear understanding of what drives the business at a truly in-depth level and what that roadmap to success looks like on your own and then figure out a way to communicate that to investors clearly. Otherwise, they will kind of overlay their own projection and their own idea of what that should look like, which in most cases is wrong because they haven't spent as much time in your specific space. That's probably the most important thing is like really understand your business and pitch the right story to growth. And for us as a concrete example, our focus has not been massive scale yet. That's where we're going. We're not cranking out thousands of these. The reason for that is that we've been very kind of clear around there are certain technical and operational milestones and efficiency milestones that we want to hit before we scale. And that will allow us to scale at an increased...”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expansion is truly a couple years out. I'm not going to say to East Coast, but expansion beyond LA is a couple years out because this isn't the type of product where you want to expand and build like five or 10 or 20 even in one city. Every city that we expand into, we want to be building at least 100 or like in that region within a two hour drive, at least 100 a year. As you expand, you basically want to just fill your pipeline and you're likely going to be basically production constrained. Your expansion will largely be limited by like how fast you can grow the factory as you go and expand into each place.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Architecture industry. It's mostly from consumer products, SpaceX, Tesla. We've got someone that had experience at Kurig. Also construction, we've got one of the world's top structural engineers. He was like the lead structural engineer for the Apple Campus in Cupertinos. But the role of the people from outside of the construction industry was not immediately. Retrospect looks really obvious”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that we learned fairly early on was counterintuitive. I come from an architecture background. My co-founder also studied architecture, but was much more interested in software and had built and sold a website in high school. So he kind of more of the tech world. And I came more from the architecture world. And as we started building cover, one of the big realizations that we had was that the team that we needed to build was, yes, we needed people that understood architecture and construction, but we needed far more people who understood manufacturing. and automotive production and aerospace production, the design engineering and building of large-scale physically complex products. Because if you're trying to build a home like a car, turns out that you actually want someone who knows how to build a car more so than you even want someone that knows how to build a home. That was actually not immediately obvious to us from the beginning. And now most of our team is not from the construction.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really love sunlight. I would love a skylight cover panel. From a focus standpoint, I know that's not coming soon, and that's fine, but especially if you have a room that has north facing windows that would normally get direct light, skylight can be really nice.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that kind of went through an evolution, right? When we started off, was just learn how to build something that works. And then it involved like adding more to that, what does that work mean? So let's make it work. Let's make it look nice. Then let's make it functional while be super energy efficient. Now let's make it economical to build and faster to build. We've gone through this iteration process. Most of the time when you focus on the manufacturer ability and making it easy to build, for the most part, if you pay attention to what the materials are and you're making smart material cost trade-offs, the numbers work. You just really have to pay attention to the material costs and then making it easy to build.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up to around four to six stories. They work really well, which is more than 90% of construction. Today, we're not building multi-story structures. We're really focused, but from a structural standpoint and from a panel standpoint.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Upsize for like five years down the road. With our way of building, these are panels that just like they're quick to assemble, they're actually fairly quick to disassemble too. So if you want to add an extra bedroom, you can do that. And you can do that way more easily. Their Lego panels. So you can just remove a few panels, attaching a few panels, grow the home. And to start horizontally, but you can also grow vertically too. Like, oh, let's add a second story. Let's take the roof panels and move them up and then add the interstitial panels as an example. That ability to rapidly change homes and then eventually cities, I think that's probably the biggest thing that will change. And then the other way around, kids move out. You don't need as much space. You can go sell those panels. Look at secondary market where someone will go buy a used cover panels and build their home.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that the biggest thing that this way of building enables that is different is today people think of their homes as a very permanent thing that I don't want to change. Often if people are running out of space in their home, they sell their home and they move into a new home because that's so much easier than doing an addition or a renovation or rebuilding it from the ground up. The future that we're building is one where you can start off with your one bedroom home with an office, let's say. And then as a family grows, you can literally just order bedrooms as you need them. It doesn't need to be this one-off big thing that you kind of have to honestly waste money on before you need it. A couple doesn't need in most cases a four bedroom home. Most people would prefer not to for a cost standpoint. But the cost of moving is so high that they kind of like.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, 98% of homes are built conventionally and about 2% are built with prefab. Success is when we flip that. When most homes are built this way, and as a result, they're significantly higher quality. It's not just about making homes cheaper or faster. These are very modern, really high-end homes, like the kind of details and finishes that you would expect in like a $10 million home is what we're building in, right? Like motorized shades that retracted to the ceiling. Really nice stuff. We see a future where that's available to everyone. The quality of the typical mass produced American home and really just home anywhere in the world is significantly higher than it is today. It's a much easier process. You don't need three years to build 100 home community or 200 home community. This can be done in a few months.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really the focus making sure that the on-site install time comes down. And just to be concrete there, that has been a lot of our focus. And we took it down from 120 days a couple years ago down to 60 and then 30 days. That was with a bigger team. And then we took it from 30 days with 15 people to 30 days with six people. We just continuously focused on making the on-site install process easier and easier. Because if you kind of go back to the automotive analogy, the on-site assembly is our automotive equivalent of a general assembly line where all the different car parts come together and finally get turned into the home. For us, that doesn't happen in our factory. That happens on site. So that needs to be incredibly efficient first because you don't want that to be the constraint. Once that's not the constraint, then you focus on the factory.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As long as the constraint is not on site where these are being assembled, that works. If the constraint is being on site, it is way more difficult to solve that because that requires meaningful product changes. So then your constraints effectively your product. So you want to get the product right before you go and start scaling these. You want your constraint to be in the factory. If the constraints in the factory, that's a well-known problem. How do you remove constraints in the factory? It's not easy, but thousands of companies have done a success.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's totally right. As an example, early on, we're trying to build more and more homes and go faster. And things in the factory were on and off. They would build a bunch of things quickly. And then all of a sudden, they didn't have what they needed to get their work done. And what we realized was the bottleneck wasn't even in the factory. It was in the information going to the factory. They didn't have the information that they needed to build what they need to build. So they didn't know what parts need to go in to what panels and how many of them were needed. for each project. The constraint isn't even always in the factory. So we realized like, okay, let's put people on this immediately and do it manually. And then after we were doing it manually, this was taking quite a bit of time. We focused our software engineering team's resources on automating a lot of this so that they could get this information automatically and it would be even more accurate and they'd get it well ahead of time. So that would not be the constraint. That's one example.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's written as a novel of this story of this plant manager, and the plant was about to fail and they weren't delivering good product on time or profitably. And then it kind of goes through the transformation journey where there was this professor that taught him how to do manufacturing and remove constraints in the system and then they'd succeed. So that's the novel. But it's really around this idea that you need to focus on where your constraint is and remove that constraint and really understand that because when you're focusing on anything other than that we're really not moving the needle at all. This is always important, but like what you work on is far more important than how well you get it done.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on top of having it set up, there's a theory of having it set up, and then there's the practice and the culture on the production floor where everyone understands why things need to be done this way and why this part quality matters. That's probably the part that has taken the longest. And we've seen really, as we've repeated and built more and more of these, we've significantly improved the speed, but also the quality. This is actually another counterintuitive thing. Initially, we thought, oh, moving faster would result in lower quality. And what we learned was that the things that you need to do to move faster are the same things that you need to do to improve the quality, which is to standardize and make the process better. So the faster we build, we've learned that quality actually gets even better.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That part thing that I mentioned totally applies to the factory too. It's actually more difficult in the factory because you do have parts for multiple homes in there at the same time. Sometimes you might make a mistake. And as a result, you have to scrap apart. And you need to know that. Because if you don't, you're going to think you have that part for the next home. And really, you've taken it off the shelf and you've used it for the home before because you've scrapped it. That's a simple example. Just tracking this is not a novel problem for us. Every factory has this problem. It seems simple, but that's like one thing. You got to build the right culture in the factory, the culture of keeping the workstations clean, making sure that everything is in its place, everything has a place and it's in its place. We know where all the tools are. These things actually really add up. If this operation requires some drill bit and that drill bit goes missing because someone went to use it somewhere else, that can just stop that production line. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and you have to have it all set up.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going from the idea and this design and turning that into something real in terms of production, in terms of delivering it, that's probably been the biggest learning. That is remarkably difficult to do. Even things as simple as keeping track of all the parts throughout your process so you don't lose anything. These homes have more than 10,000 parts that go into them. You need all 10,000 to build the home. If you're missing one, that's a three-hour delay right there or more, depending on what the part is. Three hours at best is what that is. The reality of managing all of that, that's probably been the biggest surprise.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that went better than expected and was surprising was just how our whole approach was to offer a lot of customization in terms of floor plan and very little customization. I mean, basically no customization in terms of your finishes and colors and things like that. So all covers are painted white on the inside on the livery. We only use one sink faucet and it's the same one in every single cover. We only have one set of appliances. They're sub-zero and wolf, so they're very high end. That's all we offer. So while your layout can be custom, your finish options, they're all high-end, but they're not custom. And the thing that's actually surprising is just we expected more pushback on those things. So we were surprised that actually that was very well received. And people really didn't care. As long as it was good quality. And on the other side of things, one of the things that's been surprising as this has hit reality is the reality of manufacturers.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See that as a learning opportunity too, so we'd love to go out and see what is going wrong and not only fix it for that customer, but then go root cause it and say, how can we make the product even better”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's some things that are fairly conventional, like the way that the plumbing goes through the structures is somewhat different, but the plumbing itself, any plumber could go and look at and fix. We're careful not to go too far down the make this completely alien for service reasons like this. You want, if there's a leak, someone to go and be able to quickly turn it off just like they would in conventional home and then go fix a pipe under the sink. But there's other things from a service standpoint that are more unusual. In most cases, a skilled repairman or general contractor could go and look at this and figure it out. They would first be taken aback and say, like, what's going on? But from a business standpoint, we look at this as an opportunity to get to follow the product past just the handoff point. So we actually today, we're the first point of contact that our customers call if there's ever an issue. And we go out and solve it. It's possible for others to solve it, but we actually want to solve it because that way we can learn about how did this happen. Was it something?”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A real problem. You have to just solve that upstream with the engineering and then the production. It's one thing to have the right panel dimensions on the drawing. It's another thing to actually have those made consistently every time the right way. The manufacturing side of this is very difficult too.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the last mile thing, you're right. Like Legos, if you're missing something, you're kind of screwed. So basically we've spent a lot of time, a lot of time. This is a lot of the headaches early on. Basically making sure that we're not missing anything, that the parts are fully engineered and that they will fit together when they show up on site. Otherwise, you're doing all this work in the factory. Then you have to go on site, undo all of this work in the factory, fix it, which is way less efficient than conventional construction. That's way. That's what makes this really hard. With conventional construction, you can show up on site and just start trimming things. Maybe things are slightly off in terms of dimensions, but you can sand them down. You can trim them. You can fill it in with Spackle. And at the end of the day, the home still looks great and works. With us, these panels are these big, not easily modifiable panels that get installed and assembled quickly. But if they don't fit together, that's.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it checks that those sets will fit together well, will perform nicely, will have good energy efficiency, will be structurally sound, and then it generates the permit sets for those LEGO sets. All the permit drawings are the engineering drawings that even flows down into the production line. All the information that's needed to actually go and build these, how many of panel X or Y or Z do we need? That's really the role of the software here. It's kind of the glue that holds it all together.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically interacting with each other. What we've done is we've taken the information about our panels, the structural information as an example, and codified the rules around those. So you can combine this number of panels for this span in this seismic zone. So we've put all of this information to software and we can generate a design that we know works structurally without having to do pages and pages of calculations manually. That's just an example of the role that software plays, but really the way you can think about the software is going back to the Lego analogy, the Lego bricks are preset. There's a fixed set of Lego bricks. But what we're trying to do is make different sets, different Lego sets for each person based on their property, based on their needs, their preferences, their budget. What our software does is it takes the Legos and it intelligently assembles them into”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our vision for this from day one was always customization in a way that actually scales. How do we compete not with other prefab companies that have five models? How do we compete with your local general contractor who can build whatever you want from a layout standpoint? So we have these standardized panels. Then there's the question of, well, how do you combine these panels to make a home? And then does that home overall perform the way it needs to? So how do you generate those designs? So that's where the software comes in. With conventional construction, you come up with a floor plan, you go and show that to an engineer, they come back with feedback, oh, this span is too big, or you can do this, but it's going to require this steel I beam that's going to add $10,000 of cost to the project. If you go five feet smaller, you don't need that anymore. So there's this kind of value engineering that is part of the conventional construction process with very slow iteration cycles, give multiple consolidants.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off with a high end product, you cannot use the Tesla analogy, right? We're starting off with the roadster and we're focusing on relatively low volume. And the reason for that is you can iterate quickly, you can learn quickly, you don't have to make massive investment in hundreds of millions of dollars of automation. And then as we ramp production and as we iterate on the product and lower the price and set up the supply chains, we make it available to everyone and we drive down the price. So that's the approach that we're taking from a strategy standpoint because it's really hard to just start off with a mass market price product when you're small. You kind of have to start with something high-end where you can make a margin and then lower the cost over time.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The breakdown is roughly, I mean, you have the soft costs, so things like permits, engineering fees, architecture fees to get the whole community planned. You have the land development costs. So you have the roads, the sewer network, the electricity network, which is all built by the developer. And then you get to the home, which is the thing that goes on a lot that we typically think of as like the home cost. Those costs will vary quite a bit based on the location. But when you look at the typical home, it's like labor and materials are both the major cost areas in the typical home. Our focus in terms of how we change that is first moving a lot of the labor into the factory where you can make it more efficient. You can build tooling and fixtures around it. And then making the on-site installation process really fast to make that labor side significantly less. So that's really the focus. Today we're starting.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, when you go into places that are more expensive, let's say California can go to like 50%. Obviously, the price goes up. That's just at a high level. First of all, where you start, what's land, what's construction. And then from there, on the”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The median home price in the US is around $430,000. Now, that includes land. And most of those are in fairly suburban locations, right? Away from city centers. That's kind of what the typical American home looks like today. So today we're not building there. We're very focused right now on building backyard homes. And the reason for that is it's the true minimum viable product. What's the minimum viable product of a home, a backyard home? It still has a kitchen. It still has a bathroom. It's just smaller. So that's why we're focused on that. We're also focused right now on the Los Angeles market. And the reason for that is also start small, incredibly focused, develop operational excellence. And then once you've got the whole process and product working really well, then scale it. That's the approach. When you look at the typical American home, it's about 30% land. So you're looking at in that 430,000 dollar home, you're looking at around $130,000 of that being land.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built homes on $25 million lots in Los Angeles. And in those cases, the person building it could afford anyone. And they chose to go with us because they love the product and it was really easy. It was way, way less headache. That's the other thing is that even if you want to build something like that, you're going to have to spend a ton of time, hours every week just seeing that vision through. Whereas with us, if you like what we have, it's extremely easy. You just say, yep, I want this layout and then we'll go deliver it and comes with everything standard.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have some really great construction people on the team, and a lot of them actually were skeptical at first. The more they did this, the more they realized, this is actually crazy efficient. I think from a craftsman standpoint, this isn't for everyone. I will say that in terms of home. If you want a home that's going to be exactly how you want it and you're willing to spend the time and the money to achieve that, now we're not talking about this is not the typical American home at this point. This is less than, I'd say, 0.5% of homes or maybe even 0.1% of homes are built like this, but where you have an architect, an engineer, a set of really, really incredible craftspeople, and you make really a work of art come true, this artistic vision for your home, we are not well suited to do that. That's not what we're trying to do. There is a high-end market where some people just really want exactly what they want, and we can't deliver that. So I think someone might say that, but they would be right. Having said that, though, we've also”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So early on, that's not what we did. We said, oh, this wall panel is going to have plumbing, so let's add a chase for the plumbing. And then what we realized was exactly that. Let's actually make it so that every single wall panel, you can put plumbing or electrical through. And then whether you choose to use it or not, it's just a different option. And that way it's more standardized, which means from a production standpoint and a process standpoint, you build the same thing over and over again more. You've got the added benefit that if you ever want to renovate your home and change things up, it's actually really easy.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a wall panel is like six feet by 10 feet roughly, and then we have different sizes, but that's kind of like a typical wall panel. And then floor panels, I mean, they can be five, six feet wide. And then from a length standpoint, it could be five, six feet, or you can go to 30 feet. But you don't need a big crane.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we said, this is interesting. This is probably not the right size Lego block. You probably don't want Lego blocks that are entire runes. The way we looked at it was what is a thing that is truly standardized about construction? And it turns out the walls, the floors, the roof, the windows. If you look at most homes in America, those are built very similarly. There's not a lot of different wall construction. And so we said, well, why don't we standardize that? Why don't we build these wall panels, floor panels, ceiling panels, design them for manufacturability from the start, but we can build those repetitively in the factory the exact same wall panels 100 times or thousands of times and then deliver those to site and assemble them and assemble them to create different homes. That was the other thing is by going to that LEGO block, the amount of variety in terms of the layout that you can deliver is huge for all practical purposes.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want repetition. You want to build the same thing over and over again. And when you have room size Lego blocks, it's very hard to make those the same because that's the level where people really care about customization. And the other thing that we learned was that these large room size panels, you needed a pilot car, basically you need special permits and a pilot car and you could only transport it during certain times of the day because it was often wider than what you could fit on a truck. You know when you see those trucks with like flags and front and back driving down the highway that's how most of these were transported. Most of them still are with conventional prefab. That's expensive. It's time consuming. And then on top of that, once you get to the site, you need this large crane to lift it into place. And that crane is like 20,000 dollars a day, which is a lot. That's like 10% of the typical American home. That might make sense in LA and some other high-end markets, but it doesn't seem like a solution that can really scale. And we saw.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To learn what they had done right and wrong. And one thing that stood out was that the Lego block that most of these companies had were these large, basically container like room-sized Lego blocks where it's an entire room. And the more we researched that, the more we learned that there were a lot of challenges with that. One was just from a factory standpoint, you have this giant room moving through your production line, which is hard to move, hard to store. It requires a ton of space. And it looks a lot like conventional construction because you're not going to be rotating an entire 40 foot thing all the time. That'd be very expensive. So access is limited. It's just not an easy way to build a factory. Not to mention that the room itself, you do need a lot of customization on room size. You want from a factory standpoint to be building the thing that's as consistent as possible.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I looked pretty thoroughly at the time when we were starting cover what was already out there. My co-founder and I, even actually after we started cover, we spent quite a bit of time researching existing prefab companies or even prefab companies that existed.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It and also remove it. The reason I say remove it is so that you can access plumbing, electrical behind it. The way construction is done from a service standpoint is insane. Imagine if every time you had a car trouble, you took a hole saw to the body of your car and like drilled out a hole to inspect on what's going on inside and then maybe you drilled a hole in the wrong place. You've got to drill one somewhere else and then take a hammer to it and rip apart the body of the car to access what's behind it. It sounds absurd to talk about surfacing a car like that, but somehow we've all accepted that that's how homes should be serviced. And we said there's got to be a better way. So our ceiling panels, they're an aluminum composite panel. They get installed with one or two people. It's lightweight. If you want to access all the plumbing or electrical behind it, you can basically just pop it out. It requires some force that it doesn't pop out if someone's jumping on the roof or during an earthquake.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most prefab companies basically said, oh, let's build homes in a factory the exact same way as conventional construction. We took the complete opposite approach, which is we said, what does the wall need to achieve from a performance standpoint, from a look and feel standpoint, just overall? What does the wall need to achieve cost standpoint? And then how do we achieve that? When you're doing that and you're thinking that you're going to rapidly assemble this and you want to be easily serviceable, the resultant materials are completely different from conventional construction. It's not like we said, oh, we want to have different materials. We just started with a different set of objectives. And then that resulted in different materials. Let's take the ceiling as an example. The ceiling is not something that most people touch often. It doesn't be like a hard surface that you can lean against. It needs to do well from like a sound standpoint. You don't want to hyper reflective ceiling that's going to ruin the acoustics of a room. Ideally from an installation standpoint, you want it to be lightweight. You want one or two people to be able to just quickly install.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made on the specific machines to make it easier and lower cost and faster to make. And nobody had done that for the home. And it struck me as this is an incredible opportunity to improve the quality of the home's that are built, lower the cost, and make them abundantly available to everyone.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Homes, and that would explain it. And then when I started looking that up, there are more cars built per year than homes, but if you look at it in terms of square footage, there's more square footage of homes built per year than cars. They're basically the same order of magnitude in terms of how much physical stuff are you making a year? And that shocked me too, because I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Why is there such a big difference in the quality and the whole process, the whole way you do this? And the more I thought about it, the more building homes in a factory like cars just seem obvious. So that's when I started looking into prefab and researching prefab and I went and worked for a prefab company thinking that they had the solution to the problem. And when I worked there, what I realized is that what they were basically doing is taking conventional construction, building with like two by fours and hammers and nails and drywall and replicating that exact same process inside of a factory. And you enough about manufacturing to know that when you move something into a factory, you want the product to be designed for manufacturability from the start. You design the parts for how they're going to be”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is it like this? At one point, it was thinking about automotive production and cars and how a car like a home is this space that you go inside of. It has windows. It has doors. It has heating and cooling. It has a lot of safety features. It actually is a quite comparable product to a home. It's very different, obviously. In many ways, much more complex than a home, but it's similar. So I was looking at that and realized that a Toyota Camry was 260 bucks per square foot. And I knew enough home building where mass production homes built cheaper than that, but basically a lot of homes in cities, cities like Los Angeles, are built at a higher price than that. And that shocked me as a number because when you look at the physical car versus the physical home and how complex each one is, the car is much more complicated. So then my mind went towards, oh, it's got to be a scale thing, right? There's got to be way more cars built than...”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, growing up from when I was honestly like seven years old, 10 years old, I loved architecture, design, construction. Like I drew my first floor plan in grade one. So I wasn't interested in this space. And the more I learned through working with family and friends that were doing their own renovation projects or their own construction projects. And then through internships and through school, I learned and saw a bunch of mistakes being made, small mistakes. I just saw a process that was very time consuming, very expensive, very unpredictable. And it wasn't a localized issue. It wasn't this one place where I saw that. It was consistent across the board, even in multiple countries. I grew up in Canada, saw it in Canada, side in the United States. And all of a sudden Europe where I had an internship. So I saw this patterns, even though the physical way that they were constructing buildings was very different. The underlying patterns of basically being a slow process, expensive process, and unpredictable process were the same. That's when I started asking the question.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you ship these on a regular flatbed to the site and you rapidly assemble them. And the keyboard is like rapidly assembling them on site. I think the factory is where you have the automation. The factory is where you walk in and this looks like an automotive factory, right? We have like robotic arms welding things and it's highly automated mass production. And then you ship them onto the site. And that's where people assemble them, but they assemble them so quickly that it looks nothing like home building today. I mean, today, just as an example, we're already at building these in about a month with six people, which is way faster than conventional construction. It would typically take anywhere from eight months to a year and a half. And the average home in the US actually has 24 subcontractors involved in the process. That's where we see this going. And what that means is that there's still actually a need for a lot of people to be in the construction industry. We can just build a lot more homes with those people.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a five million home shortage in the United States. So that's just a huge number. And then on top of that, you have places where you just cannot get the homes built that are needed because there isn't a supply of labor because there's just neighborhoods, areas where there's a lack of skilled construction labor and there's demand for homes there. And those homes are just not getting built at all. We couple that with right now high interest rates even harder to afford a home, especially for a first-time homebuyer who's going to have a lot of debt. On top of that, you add the fact that the construction workforce is aging and dwindling. The average is around 45, which is really older than it's ever been. That's a kind of scary situation because it's not getting better. People aren't going into becoming carpenters and becoming plumbers and electricians. So there's this problem where there's a need for home.”
2023-04-25 · Invest Like the Best · Alexis Rivas - A New Blueprint for Homebuilding - [Invest Like the Best, EP.326] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source